No one can deny that the United States is now, and has always been, a nation of immigrants, even if the issue of immigration has become one of the most contentious and divisive of our current age. And yet, improbable as it may sound, I don’t remember hearing the word “immigrant” until I was in early adulthood. It was likely because of a quirk in history and geography. For one, my childhood during the Great Depression and World War II marked one of the lowest ebbs of foreign arrivals to our shores in our nation’s history. And also the Texas of my youth seemed to me at the time so overwhelmingly white and Protestant that it was hard to imagine any other type of America.
Of course it wasn’t really white. Houston also contained a significant population of African Americans, but they lived separate, segregated lives, and very little attention was paid in my school or upbringing to the means by which their ancestors had arrived in the Americas. There were also many Mexicans in Houston, but we never really considered them immigrants so much as the cultural backdrop of Texas. The southern border of the United States was not far away, and nobody paid it much heed at the time. We all knew that it could be easily crossed from both sides for purposes of work and pleasure. I remember Mexican children, the sons and daughters of migrant farmworkers, starting each fall at my elementary school. By the time we got to Thanksgiving, the harvest and livestock roundups were complete, and all of those schoolmates would be gone.
There were undoubtedly small immigrant communities in Houston—Irish and Italian populations, Catholics and Jews—but none of these groups made a sizable impression on my young consciousness.
But later, when I was wooing my wife, Jean, I traveled out to meet her family in the deep hinterland of Texas. This was about as far as one could get from people’s perceptions of immigrant America—the Lower East Side of New York City, the ethnic neighborhoods of the midwestern cities, the Chinatowns of the West. Hers was a place of open vistas, where the scrub oaks far outnumbered the human inhabitants. But Jean was a descendant of a hardy immigrant stock that still harbored a strong sense of their transatlantic journey, one made many decades earlier.
Jean came from a people known as the Wends, a Lutheran minority of Slavic ancestry who had been living in Germany and had faced cultural and religious persecution. In the days of the Texas Republic, before it joined the United States (1836 – 1845), the government in Austin commissioned agents in Europe to encourage immigrants to populate their young nation. One thing Texas had in abundance was land, and its government was promising large tracts to immigrants who would settle on the frontier (I imagine they made little mention of the existing Native American population). The story goes that this appeal made a big impression on a congregation of Wends, and a few families made the arduous journey to the U.S. They sent back glowing reports of vast horizons, of both geography and opportunity. This was enough for the entire congregation to make the dangerous passage across the great Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. Many died of disease en route, but the ones who survived landed in Galveston and spread inland. Many set up communities in towns so small they consisted of just a few families. Jean’s hometown of Winchester had a population that could be counted in the few dozens.
As I got to know Jean’s family, I began to revel in the great immigrant currents that had shaped the United States more broadly. I saw how this was a continent that beckoned to the poor and persecuted from around the globe with offers of freedom and seemingly boundless space. For much of the relatively short history of the United States, most of the world still lived under the remnants of feudal systems. The United States offered a destiny of one’s own making.
From Jean’s relatives, I learned that moving here did not require erasing a pride in one’s ancestry. While the Wends had embraced their American identity, they still felt strongly affiliated with the cultural taproots of the old country. It struck me at times that their journey to America seemed to have happened in the recent past, even though not one of Jean’s living family members had known a home other than the challenging Texas prairie. And I saw how thoroughly these families embraced their American identity—they were patriots, just like the people with whom I had grown up. But they also understood that they were from another continent. This is one of the greatest lessons of our nation’s improbable makeup: A united citizenry can be quilted together from so many different cultural fabrics. I was already in my twenties, but I was realizing I had a lot to learn about a country I loved deeply.
We all have come here from somewhere else, and the vast majority of us are only a few generations removed from another land. Whether that is one generation or ten, it seems rather sanctimonious to claim that there is much of a difference. Not many of us can trace our arrival back a few hundred years, let alone millennia. But even the ancestors of the Native Americans are believed to have come across a land bridge from Asia—a reminder that we are a species of migrations, and always have been. Of course, not all migrations have been voluntary; many are here because their ancestors were ripped from their homelands in Africa and carried across the ocean in bondage.
Too many times the term “American” has been used as a weapon against new immigrants, especially those who look, speak, or pray differently. And yet one of the noblest ideals of our country is that anybody from anywhere can be an American. This has been, and continues to be, an eternal battle between our demons and angels for the soul of the United States. And it was present at the baptism of a nation that proclaimed “all men are created equal” but defined many men as three-fifths of a whole, never mind women of all races.
The debate over immigration takes many forms, and some of them are worth considering. We are a land of opportunity and prosperity, and it would be wonderful if we had the ability to welcome everyone seeking a better life to our shores. We cannot, so we will always have to make hard choices. There are also many hard questions. How do we handle undocumented immigrants, not only the ones who have crossed our southern border, but also those who have overstayed visas? How do we continue to welcome skilled workers who can benefit our economy without taking jobs away from American citizens capable of doing the work but who might demand a higher wage? How do we contend with the fact that many undocumented workers do difficult and dangerous jobs, in agriculture, construction, and service, that most Americans do not seem to want to do themselves? How do we balance empathy for refugees seeking asylum with security concerns? Immigration will always be a complicated and perplexing issue, especially if we remain a country that is perceived as a promised land. That is the spirit that drew most of our ancestors, and hopefully we will remain such a nation.
As we all know, however, the immigration debate isn’t only about policy and economics; it is also about culture, race, and religion. We are at a particularly ugly juncture in this regard, but we have been here before. In the early days of the republic, the country needed settlers, so nearly anyone could immigrate. Then, as the United States started to grow and be seen as a land of opportunity, a big wave of immigration began in the decades before the Civil War. Most were from Northern and Central Europe, and many were Catholics—particularly from Germany and Ireland. This sparked a fierce backlash and the rise of the American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party. Its ranks were driven largely by anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments. The ugly echoes of their intolerance can be heard today, and it is ironic that some who question the “Americanness” of more recent arrivals are themselves descendants of those who were labeled “un-American” in the nineteenth century.
In the mid-1800s, the United States also saw an influx of immigrants from China, drawn by the rush for gold in California and the need for labor and entrepreneurial energy that accompanied the miners. Even though Chinese laborers undertook the dangerous work of the western half of the transcontinental railroad, discrimination against them was intense. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States. Japanese immigration expanded to fill labor demand no longer being provided by Chinese immigrants, and it grew rapidly after the turn of the century up and down the Pacific coast. But a so-called gentleman’s agreement between the U.S. and Japanese governments soon limited formal immigration from that country as well.
At the same time, new waves of immigrants were hitting the eastern shores from Southern and Eastern Europe, including millions of Catholics and Jews. This shift in the makeup of the United States citizenry sparked an effort to make America look more like it once did. Congress passed sharp quotas on immigration in the 1920s, favoring people from Northern Europe, which set the stage for one of the most shameful chapters in our history. As refugees started to pour out of Europe to escape fascism, the United States tightened its borders and even turned some ships away, sending men, women, and children back to their deaths.
This xenophobia at the time of World War II also affected how Americans viewed their fellow citizens. The internment of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans came from misplaced fears that they might sabotage the war effort. Fear has often been a powerful motivator for exclusion and persecution. German Americans were ostracized—and some even detained—during the First World War (much less so during World War II). These days, Muslims find themselves particularly under attack, not only by discriminatory new government immigration policies but also in schools, public spaces, and other avenues of daily life where their fellow citizens often make negative assumptions about their religion and reasons for being here. Never mind that immigrants are rarely responsible for violent acts. Seldom do they attempt to undermine the values of our country.
Instead, we have seen time and again that immigrants and their children are eager to serve their new nation, and often at great sacrifice. While Japanese Americans were being interned during World War II, an infantry regiment was formed of Japanese American soldiers—mostly the sons of immigrants from Hawaii. Because of the sheer numbers of Japanese Americans living in Hawaii, it was unfeasible to send most of them to internment camps (demonstrating the capriciousness of the policy). Thousands of young Japanese American men enlisted in what became known as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The 442nd saw fierce fighting in Europe and is, by some estimations, the most decorated group of soldiers in American history. As a Texan, I was keenly aware of their service when, in October 1944, they rescued the so-called Lost Battalion (a unit of the Texas National Guard), which had been surrounded by the Nazi army in the Vosges Mountains of France. After a hellacious winter battle, 211 of the 275 men in the Lost Battalion walked out alive, while the 442nd suffered 800 dead and wounded in the fight.
In recent years, when I reported from distant and dangerous military outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw a great diversity of surnames stitched into uniforms—and the pride of service in diverse faces. It was renewed proof that we are a nation of immigrants who believe in service. I have had a similar experience reading the names etched into marble in Arlington National Cemetery. Patriotism and sacrifice know no ethnicity, race, or religion. And it has always been thus. Whether it’s the more than 40 percent of the Union soldiers in the Civil War who were born overseas or had a parent who was an immigrant, or the late Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army captain who died in a suicide attack in Iraq and then became a potent symbol in our current political debate, there should be no question about whether our newest Americans are willing to sacrifice for their adopted country.
When I moved to New York in 1962, most of the immigration was still European. Certain nationalities coalesced around certain trades, and I found that the soundmen’s union was almost exclusively Eastern European (they would often merge German and English, saying “mitout sound” instead of “without sound”). The cameramen seemed to be mostly Irish, and there were all sorts of other accents I had never heard before. Around the CBS newsroom, at drinks after work, and out on assignment, much of our banter was hardly politically correct, and there was a lot of ethnic stereotyping in our jokes. But I remember being struck by how collegial it all felt. In the news business, like the army, you can’t get much done if you don’t work together.
This was also the first time I really got to know Jewish Americans, starting when Bernie Birnbaum took me under his wing. He was different from me in every way imaginable—native New Yorker, the son of Russian immigrants, Fulbright Scholar. We instantly became dear friends. Bernie was a fast talker, and I remember struggling to keep up with his flow of words, and his accent. I had never even heard of kosher food, so Bernie took me to the famed Carnegie Deli, where he explained the concept in the midst of a sea of tables filled with other fast talkers. Bernie had nothing for clothes and his socks would sometimes be mismatched. In my naïveté, I remember thinking this was what all Jewish people were like. Ernie Leiser, who had hired me after seeing my coverage of Hurricane Carla for the CBS affiliate in Houston, was everything Bernie was not: well tailored, calm, and soft-spoken. I had no idea that he was also Jewish until Bernie told me. I was learning that real people didn’t fall neatly into stereotypes, a lesson that many need to revisit these days.
The immigrant spirit that coursed through the hallways of CBS News was seen as one of our core strengths. Blair Clark, the vice president of CBS News, was about as traditional American stock as you could get, Harvard-educated from a prominent white Protestant family. But he was a true progressive and would later become editor of the Nation magazine. With a nod to the dapper CBS News correspondents of the day, Clark advised me to “dress British and think Yiddish” if I wanted to be successful. A comment like this might seem offensive or anachronistic in today’s world, but I certainly don’t think that was his intention and it was not how I took it.
What we didn’t know at the time was that a sea change was coming that would transform the United States forever. On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Liberty Island in the harbor of New York and signed a sweeping change to America’s immigration laws. At the feet of the monumental statue that had welcomed so many of the huddled masses to our shores, Johnson undid a system that had been in place since the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1920s.
The new law eliminated immigration quotas based on race, ethnicity, and nation of origin. Instead, it set up different preferential criteria, such as having a relative who was a U.S. citizen or legal resident and working in a profession with specialized skills. Johnson framed the bill in rousing language: “[The old system] violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. . . . Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”
For all the soaring rhetoric, there was a feeling at the time that this 1965 law would not change America too drastically. (Johnson himself said it was “not a revolutionary bill.”) The preference for immigrants with family members already living in the United States was seen by many as a way to ensure that a predominantly white country stay that way. In reality it has had the opposite effect, as individuals from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and many other far-flung locations have immigrated to the United States, and their extended families have followed. The resulting change in American demographics has been revolutionary. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1965, 84 percent of Americans were non-Hispanic white. By 2015, that number had dropped to 62 percent. And they estimate that “by 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.” That is a staggering shift. Think about the paintings of our Founding Fathers, the presidential portraits, the old black-and-white newsreels and photographs of Americans at work and play. The faces in all of those are predominantly white. That America is fading, and we will become more diverse in the future.
Over the course of our nation’s history, waves of immigration have time and again expanded the definition of what it means to be an American. And each time, eras of permissive immigration were bracketed by eras of deep restrictions. Those who wished to bar the Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Catholics, the Jews, and now the Muslims and so many others have all used some version of the same argument: America will no longer be America.
They have always been wrong. We have attracted some of the best scientists and inventors and entrepreneurs and artists and athletes and every other category you can think of because we are a place where people of all kinds can be Americans.
But we cannot deny that change can create feelings of anxiety and unease among those who see America, as they know it, slipping away. We should not succumb to bigotry, but we should also have empathy for those who are worried about their future. There are legitimate concerns, but if politicians of all persuasions tried to speak to audiences beyond their own voting base and argued that we must root for prosperity among all Americans, I suspect much of this anxiety could be diminished. That can’t happen easily or quickly. It will require time and tolerance. It is one of our most difficult challenges of the twenty-first century.
We have been able to reach consensus on immigration, even relatively recently. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan oversaw the passage of a bill that allowed millions of people living in this country without documentation to come out of the shadows. Two years earlier, President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success. But with the right leadership, I believe we could find similar compromise today.
I remember a moment late in the 2008 presidential campaign when Barack Obama returned to his birth state of Hawaii for a vacation. Some pundits criticized this decision for the optics, arguing that our fiftieth state might strike some voters as exotic and foreign. At the same time, there was also a candidate on the ballot from the forty-ninth state, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The glaciers and tundra of the Last Frontier are just as exotic as the beaches and palm trees of Hawaii, but I don’t remember hearing that Alaska was somehow bad for campaign optics. What I think was at issue wasn’t geography but race. Hawaii is the most diverse state in the Union, the result of waves of Asian immigration. By contrast, Alaska is predominantly white, save for a considerable population of Native Americans.
These states are two of the most marvelous and welcoming in our nation. Their natural wonders are matched only by the friendliness of their inhabitants, and I have enjoyed my time in both immensely. But when you look at the demographic trends of the United States, Alaska is more a throwback to the past, and Hawaii a glimpse of the future. We are destined to look and live more like Hawaii, a multiethnic society where racial lines are blurred through intermarriage, and cultural heritages combine into a new America. Even my hometown of Houston is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country.
Today we see an eagerness among some of our elected officials—buoyed by passionate segments of the voting public—to erect new barriers to immigration. But these efforts will not stop the demographic momentum already underway in the United States. If anything, I believe that demonizing the most recent arrivals to our shores will only, over time, galvanize the political will of the majority of Americans who understand the true legacy of our history.
When I walk around this great land, in small towns and big cities, bus stations and airports, baseball stadiums and art museums, I see an America that has expanded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. We are a people of energy and purpose, a blended land of ever-increasing diversity that so far has proven the strength and wisdom of our great experiment. We must find a way to defeat the forces of intolerance. If we do, we will emerge a better, stronger nation.